


coup de grâce

by slybrunette



Category: Grey's Anatomy
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-10
Updated: 2011-03-10
Packaged: 2017-10-16 20:09:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/168889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slybrunette/pseuds/slybrunette
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>an au take on 2x18 "yesterday". meredith just needs a few shots of tequila and a warm bed, warm body optional.</p>
            </blockquote>





	coup de grâce

The dirty mistresses lose.

Mark is still there when she leaves, parked in his seat and determined to come out on top, determined to win this one because Mark is the kind of guy who needs to come out the winner at the end of the day to avoid counting previous failures like sheep for the sleepless. They’re the same in so many ways but different where it counts.

Meredith just needs a few shots of tequila and a warm bed, warm body optional.

What she gets is the alcohol, an ill-advised drive home when she’s too drunk to drive and too sober to call a cab, and a stranger’s car in her driveway.

“Are you Meredith?” A jittery woman asks, hands shoved wrist deep in her jean pockets and wide eyed. Clear eyed. Meredith’s head is swimming, and the fire inside of her that had her wanting to throw things and then wanting to break down in tears has gone out, has left nothing but a void, has left her numb.

There’s a strange woman standing in her driveway and it’s almost midnight, the lights still on in the living room, in the upstairs bedroom window that means Izzie or Izzie _and_ Alex are here, so it’s not hard to deduce that she was being sought out specifically. It should bother her. It should unnerve her but it doesn’t, and this woman looks more scared of her than Meredith’s ever going to feel towards another person unless they’re holding a gun.

“Yeah,” she says, and her voice seems to boom, too loud for the dark and the quiet. There’s a shake to the woman’s shoulders. She startles easy because there was a jolt when Meredith’s headlights her car as she was pulling in and Meredith doesn’t even know her but she’s already starting to look at her as something fragile, something either easily broken or already on the edge of breaking.

She hasn’t decided.

“I’m sorry, am I – “ and she’s going to finish, going to ask if she’s supposed to know her, whether by face or by name, except the bundle of nerves in front of her unravels and there’s sharp exhale and then –

“I think I’m your sister.” The woman looks down, looks to the side, just looks elsewhere in general, and there’s this smile that looks more sad than happy, something wrought from nervousness and Meredith recognizes the way her lips twist almost immediately. She does that. She’s never seen herself do it, clearly, because she doesn’t spend most of the day staring at herself in mirrors, but she imagines if you change the facial features, thin out the lips, that it’s a lot like what she would look like, roles reversed. “Well, half-sister anyway.”

Meredith imagines a reaction, of any kind, would be ideal but all she can muster is a hard swallow and, “You like tequila?”

 

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

Lexie – her supposed half-sister, which should be upgraded to definitely half-sister because not only do they share a last name but Lexie saw her car parked outside of Thatcher’s house and proceeded to coax a last known address out of their father somewhere around his third scotch – does like tequila.

She’d call her inventive, call her creative, but that would be too much like praise and Meredith knows that however this goes, it ends in tears, and that’s not the sort of thing you encourage. Even if she brought this on herself, even if she made that choice to drive to her father’s, to see him and find out he had no answers for her, to find out that he wasn’t a villain just another man who broke her heart, only he had the distinction of being the first and so the scars run deeper.

“He told us he was married before, that he had a daughter,” Lexie’s on her second glass, slow with it, the kind who thinks of _pace yourself_ as less of a suggestion and more as a rule. “There were three other Grey’s in the phone book but Grey is like the seventy-ninth most popular last name in the country and he said you and your mother had moved to Boston, so I never…”

The sentence’s early death is deliberate. The trivia that rolls of her tongue doesn’t seem to be. Meredith refills the glass that isn’t even empty. “You need more to drink.”

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

George is in the doorway.

Alex and Izzie are having obnoxiously loud sex upstairs and George is in the doorway, looking crestfallen.

“Do you live in a frat house?” Lexie asks, and it’s funny after the first few drinks, and downright hilarious after the next few, but George is sober and George is staring like she’s just run over his dog.

“Come join us,” Meredith says, because that’s what you say, even if you’re having an impromptu getting to know you session with the sibling you only recently discovered you had, but Lexie’s moved next to her on the couch, moved so that when one breathes the other can feel it in the movement of shoulder against shoulder, and George doesn’t seem to know what to do with this turn of events.

“No,” he says, shaking his head as he goes.

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

They move from the living room to her bedroom when it all goes quiet. After George’s door has slammed and Izzie has stopped moaning.

Meredith says, “You can’t drive home anyway,” even if she doesn’t practice what she preaches, and she leads Lexie up the stairs and down the hallway, shuts the door behind her. “You can stay here though. There’s the bed. Or there’s the couch.”

Thoughts don’t come to her in the normal order tonight. Bed before couch. Drinking before dealing.

Lexie settles on top of the covers and Meredith nods, curls her fingers around the neck of the bottle a little tighter.

 

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

They missed each other by _this much_. Traded Seattle for Boston and Boston for Seattle, and the space between their stints in the city probably amounts to a handful of months. Lexie lives there now, Harvard Med, and she’ll be back there in less than a week, but this is her spring break and she’s the kind of woman who comes home instead of heading south to Mexico, to Tahiti, somewhere warm where the alcohol never stops flowing.

Meredith went to Europe, got high in Amsterdam and shitfaced in Berlin, Sadie’s carefree laughter ringing in her ears right before her voice turned sultry.

She had a taste for defying expectations, once. Maybe still does.

At some point, Meredith hits that hazy place where she’s far gone enough that Lexie is just a warm body, a new friendly face who says things like _i wish i’d known you, before_ and then blushes afterwards, the words coming far too soon, like saying _i love you_ on a first date. A body that’s been sharing heat with her own for the last hour and a half, side by side first on the couch and now the bed, with wide eyes and soft skin.

Her bottom lip catches between her teeth and there’s a definite moment there, where she’s forgotten all about things like boundaries and socially acceptable behavior. Lexie just smiles at her, confusion dissipating with the lazy spread of her lips.

That’s when Meredith decides to call it a night.

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

She doesn’t sleep.

Lexie curls into a ball on her side, their bodies back to back, and she’s out like a light in minutes. Sleep comes slower for Meredith, her mind too cluttered, and every single sound from the shuffling feet walking through the hall to the cars on the street below them has her resurfacing, blinking back to consciousness once more.

It’s her father. It’s Derek. It’s Mark and the dirty mistresses club, and the woman next to her and what she stands for. She’s not some anonymous man she dragged in from the bar, some arrangement that ensures it all ends in the morning. In the morning there will just be hangovers and that comfortable feeling between them, the easy give and take and the way they melded into each other, will be gone with sunrise and sobriety. There will still be Lexie, at least supposedly.

That’s the way they tell you it goes. Blood relation. Family. The people who always have to take you in, except Meredith never put a whole lot of stock in that train of thought. Her father left physically, her mother mentally – maybe even emotionally before that.

Her family leaves.

Lexie will leave, an inevitability she was already well aware of but it reads different depending on the frame. Before it was just to go back to Boston because people have lives and this is all very, very new but now it’s like a warning, _don’t get attached, for this is all temporary_.

It’s three in the morning and Meredith’s always had a taste for melodrama, so it’s no surprise when she ends up with shaking shoulders and tears running hot and fast. This has been coming since she walked away from her father’s front door and felt nothing but loss, but of all the things she didn’t expect and hadn’t steeled herself for. Faced with the man instead of the villain, the myth she’d built in her head.

He seemed like a nice man. She remembers him as a nice man, who spent the first five years of her life filling in where her mother couldn’t or, more accurately, wouldn’t. But he’s not what she imagined and he’ll never be what she wants.

She doesn’t even know what she wants, just what she doesn’t, and that’s always been among her faults. She doesn’t know until it’s too late and she’s already gone through with it.

And even then –

“Hey,” there’s the hiss of a whisper to her right, followed by a hand that slides over her shoulder, tentative. Lexie’s voice is smaller when she asks, “Are you okay?”

She doesn’t trust her voice not to waver so she swallows, so she inhales as steadily as she can and nods her head. In the darkness, the gesture would go otherwise unnoticed except Lexie’s turned her body towards her and it’s a testament to just how closely she’s done so that she even notices the nod.

Lexie’s hand slides down her shoulder until it’s resting on the crook of her elbow, sharp bend against her palm, and it stays there for the rest of the night, her thumb rubbing circles against the skin there until she drifts off.

She holds on and Meredith tries not to do the same but it’s a losing battle and she’s just so tired.

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

 _fin._


End file.
